The new collection of Ted Grant’s writings are here, and more relevant than ever! 

The publication of a new third volume of Ted Grant’s Collected Writings, along with the republication of the first two volumes, marks a momentous step in equipping a new generation of communists with the ideas and methods of an oft-overlooked revolutionary.

[Pre-order your copy of Ted Grant Collected Writings volume 3 from Wellred Books here]

At a time when the postwar order of global US hegemony is falling apart, and even the present US administration – in its own words – “rejects the ill-fated concept of global domination for itself”, an understanding of how that old order came into being is crucial.

This is precisely what the third volume of Ted Grant’s Collected Writings provides. Examining how a new global equilibrium was forged out of the ruins of war, the book delves into a host of questions: the role of Stalinism, the ascendency of American capitalism, the evolution of reformism and centrism, the changes in the world economy, the Nuremberg trials, the roots of the partition of Palestine, and much more.

Spanning the watershed years of 1945 and 1946, the volume covers a once-in-a-century turning point in history that has defined the capitalist world order for generations. For Marxists today, attempting to develop a perspective of where the world is going in our own time, this material is invaluable.

A new chapter

When the Second World War drew to a close, it did not end in the way that the Fourth International had expected when Hitler fired the opening salvo of the war in 1939. Trotsky pointed out that, while any prediction of the outcome of a war is conditional on the actual march of events, the new imperialist slaughter would likely end in a revolutionary wave in which the reformists and the Stalinist leaders would be swept aside. The Fourth International, as the only Marxist International, would be propelled to the head of events and overthrow capitalism.

In many ways, the perspective of Trotsky and the Fourth International was confirmed by the revolutionary wave that swept both Europe and the colonial countries as the war came to a close. But the concrete forms through which these events unfolded were unexpected, due to the strengthening of the Soviet Union and Stalinism, which had expanded its control over Eastern Europe and raised its authority in the eyes of the masses by defeating Nazism. This new factor in the equation changed the course of the postwar period.

Ted Grant made a decisive contribution on this point, explaining why the likeliest outcome of the defeat of this wave of revolutions was not a new period of fascism and dictatorship but, owing to the weakness of the forces of reaction and the pernicious role of the Stalinist and reformist leaders, was one of ‘counterrevolution in democratic form’. Grant emerged as the principal defender of the Marxist method, insisting on analysing what actually exists – the balance of class forces internationally, the economic basis from which a slump or boom will transpire, and the role of leadership (good as well as bad) at the head of the world working class.

The Fourth International

The Revolutionary Communist Party led by Ted Grant was faced with an immense task in analysing and explaining these developments, as wartime gave way not to a new period of instability and slump of the capitalist system as was the case post-1918, but to a period of stabilisation of capitalism. This was not made easier by the fact that the regime of the Fourth International had abandoned the methods that Trotsky had patiently tried to instill in the organisation before he was killed in 1940. Unlike the RCP in Britain, the leadership of the Fourth International and the majority of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) in the United States, which was the largest section of the International, clung to the pre-war prognosis and a ‘catastrophist’ schema in their perspectives.

Instead of conducting an honest debate in the International, its leaders including James Cannon and Pierre Frank, along with their man in Britain, Gerry Healy, did everything in their power to marginalise the British section. Doubling down on their erroneous perspectives and refusing to critically evaluate their mistakes, they laid the basis for further political zig-zags down the line and a regime in the International where organisational methods were heavy-handedly used to ‘solve’ disagreements.

Their perspective document – The New Imperialist Peace and the Building of the Parties of the Fourth International – was scathingly critiqued by Ted Grant and the RCP in 1946. Even a year after the war had ended, the idea of an impending revolutionary crisis and the impossibility of a general economic recovery of capitalism was still maintained. As the official report from the international conference of April 1946 stated, becoming a mass force was at the doorstep:

“The revolutionists have now to adapt themselves not to conditions of isolation, slow growth, and the onrush of reaction but to the epoch of greatest revolutionary convulsions and greatest opportunities for building the revolutionary parties.”

In the minds of Cannon and Healy, the small size of the International could be overcome simply through adopting the method of entryism. In the case of Britain, this meant dissolving the organisation first into the Independent Labour Party and later the Labour Party itself. Since a revolutionary crisis was on the horizon, they argued, the mass organisations would radicalise rapidly to the left, and the Trotskyists would go from strength to strength.

This mechanical application of Trotsky’s advice to small groups of Fourth Internationalists in the 1930s was not based on a concrete understanding of where the economy and the reformist parties were actually heading after the war. Instead they flowed from the mistaken idea that capitalism had reached a ‘final’ crisis.

Ted, meanwhile, argued that, although capitalism had played out its historical role as a progressive socio-economic system – clearly demonstrated by the Second World War and the slaughter of over 70 million people – this did not in itself mean the socialist revolution would automatically succeed or that the capitalists had no way to stabilise their system. It also did not preclude temporary periods of renewed upswing, and that capitalism had reached a fixed upper limit from which the economy and the productive forces could never again develop.

The postwar boom

Ted Grant spent a lot of time and energy getting to grips with economic developments. After all, economic developments are ultimately decisive for the development of society as a whole. In the final analysis, the type of policies that can be pursued, how class struggle develops, which ideas gain ground and how consciousness develops, are determined by the progress or decay of the development of the productive forces.

Parallel to the strengthening of the planned economy of the Soviet Union in the East, the United States emerged as the dominant capitalist power on the world stage.

The US ended the war with historically favourable circumstances. Having not suffered the terrible destruction as in Europe, they were able to spread their economic and political wings. Their industry was not only intact, but had developed through the war, taking over their European counterparts on all important fronts. The immense productive forces built for the manufacture of ships, planes and scientific war innovations, could in part be refitted to other arenas of industry and consumer goods.

Between 1938 and 1950 the American economy grew at an average annual rate of 6.5 percent per year with industrial production doubling in just over a decade.

Their former rivals on the world market meanwhile, had bombed each other to pieces, leaving them weak and indebted. Had it not been for the existence of the Soviet Union and the threat of revolution in the western world, the US might have thought it best to strangle the defeated countries still further, exacting enormous reparations as was done by the Allies with the Versailles Treaty in 1919.

But the strategists of American imperialism did not go down this road, opting instead to rescue and rebuild European capitalism. This provided the stimulus for an economic recovery on the other side of the Atlantic.

After the world war, it was the pressure from the US that forced the continental European powers to unite in the European Coal and Steel Community, predecessor to the EU, and for a while to overcome the national economic contradictions between them. In Britain, the ignominious fall from grace caused some upset among the capitalists, now being forced to accept their position as a second-rate power under the US umbrella.

Today, the US-European transatlantic alliance is breaking down under the hammer blows of Donald Trump’s realignment and retrenchment on the world stage, much to the dismay of the European ruling class. This is the culmination of a long-term period of relative decline of US imperialism.

Reformism and the working class

In 1945 and 1946, the development of the Atlantic alliance and the postwar boom was still in its infancy. The hot breath of revolution and class struggle could be felt across the continent, particularly in Italy and Greece, but also in Britain through the landslide election of Clement Attlee’s Labour government, which stood on breaking the war alliance with Churchill and implementing a range of social programmes. This was a unique Labour government, because it was the only one in history that actually carried out its promises! They established the National Health Service and nationalised key industries.

While this was done in a way that was satisfactory to the capitalists, a wait-and-see attitude naturally set in among the working class. Ted Grant pointed to this fact, arguing that the different conditions of the new period made Labour’s room for manoeuvre much greater than under Ramsay MacDonald’s government of 1929-31.

Despite the occasional strikes and even rationing of foodstuffs by the Labour government, a sense of stabilisation set in. As Ted explained in the RCP Perspectives of 1946, comparing the situation to the views of the year before:

“This long-term perspective of [the crisis of] British imperialism is indisputable and has been long foreseen. However, a mistake in conjunction which was made was the telescoping of the inevitable long-term crisis with the immediate perspective for Britain.”

Even Ted Grant could not have predicted how long the postwar boom would last and how far-reaching its consequences would be. But he did not get swept off his feet by the new situation. That is the key. This enabled him to foresee the contours of the period ahead, explain the changes that took place, all the while highlighting that far from solving the crisis of capitalism, an upswing laid the basis for the reemergence of all the contradictions of the system, for new crises and revolutionary events in the future.

Because of his understanding of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, Ted Grant pointed out that from a Marxist point of view, the economic development of capitalism was not simply a negative phenomenon. Through trade and the expansion of the world market, the working class grew and expanded its presence and potential power across the face of the Earth.

In other words, it deepened the fundamental contradiction within capitalism between labour and capital, and improved the balance of forces globally in favour of the working class.

Today, many on the left hark back to the reforms of the postwar boom period, without understanding the special conjunction of forces that gave rise to it. When ideas of taxing the rich and taking on state debt to finance welfare are put forward by many on the left, going back and understanding what actually formed the basis for these reforms in the postwar period, is key.

A question of method

Ted Grant’s analysis of the events of 1945-46 is not just interesting from a purely historical point of view. More than anything, they showcase his grasp of the method of Marxism; how his appreciation for the facts, and his deep understanding of the nature of the development of capitalism produced key insights into the nature of a unique period in the history which has long ceased to exist.

The same method is needed today where events are bringing about the downfall of the postwar order. The imperialist conflicts across the world and the economic crisis upending the social contract of the past 80 years will cause tremendous upheavals. The situation is creating favourable conditions for the ideas of Marxism to once again become a force of history.

The burning question is not whether opportunities will present themselves. It is whether we are prepared to intervene and successfully build the only weapon that can overthrow the capitalist system: the revolutionary party. The new publication of the first three volumes of Ted Grant’s Collected Writings – covering nine key years and spanning 2000 pages – is indispensable ammunition in the class struggle to come. The articles, perspectives, and polemics penned by Ted Grant should be read and studied by every communist today committed to the only struggle worth fighting for, the struggle for world socialist revolution.